EA made waves last week when it announced that it would be building in-game purchase capabilities into all upcoming games, a system that caused some apprehension when it showed up in AAA shooter Dead Space 3. Now, company CFO Blake Jorgensen has said that his previous statement was misconstrued: EA is definitely embracing microtransactions, but it’s not going to be putting them in every game.
In-game purchases aren’t coming to all new EA games, CFO clarifies
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
“I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have microtransactions in our games’ and the community read that to mean all our games,” Jorgensen tells Polygon, “and that’s really not true. All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free.”
"The community read that to mean all our games, and that's really not true."
In-game purchases are a standard feature of free-to-play games, but they can seem a bitter pill for gamers who have already paid $60 for a major PC or console title. At last week’s Morgan Stanley conference, Jorgensen said that “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level, to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be, and consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business.” Now, he says that was actually meant to describe basic support for microtransactions, like in-house credit card processing and downloads.
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